New Modified progress report

[Jeremy]

Option 1 sounds best. Otherwise the website just becomes a magazine, rather than some kind of footbag social media site. The over riding policy should be inclusion and community decision making. I don't think having mods at all is a good idea. Again, look at the successes of websites like facebook and twitter to set these kinds of policies. If you create a website that relies on the judgement or effort of particular people, I think that leads to trouble. If you create a website that relies on anybody who uses the site, and general community agreement, I think that will be much more successful.

[PoisonTaffy]

I already created an author privilege, but all the options are still open - the community policy is a big conversation and we might change things as we go along, that's fine and not a technical difficulty at the moment.

I want to tackle another aspect of the project that I think can make the site really attractive early on: Player profile. imo it's possible to make the player profile nice enough so that people can use it as a public link they can share about themselves. It will include info about them as players (years playing, any bap info, any event participation and titles, perhaps ranking if we implement some sort of an ranking system). It will show any posts, articles or videos submitted by the user. I'm thinking of a personal wall on it as well.
It's a lot of info, and I'm trying to tackle the challenge of organizing it.

However, I want to know how other people vision something like that. Am I missing any info? What is more important to show first and what can be hidden in a link or a tab? What kind of options should a player have when managing their profile (privacy settings, etc.)?

[PoisonTaffy]

It occurred to me today that there's a middle ground between a totally equal membership to a strict hierarchy of members and admins: A points system, where new users start with zero points, and certain actions can earn you points. Every x points, you unlock a site privilege, all the way up to full admin-ship.

One can earn points by contributing to the site's ecosystem: Filling a full profile, posting stuff, getting your stuff and comments liked, etc.

If the rules are tuned right, it could be a very attractive win-win system for the site and the members. I've seen it work elsewhere.

[PoisonTaffy]

I put the site on http://footbagfront.com

Here's a depressing setback:

In the process of working on some system administration task, which admittedly is not my expertise, I managed to wipe the database clean, including all the automatic backups.

In my defense, the action I was taking sounded harmless, and the only warning before was that "it may take several minutes".

It's a mixed blessing, as on the one hand now I know that automatic backups are insufficient and I learned how to do manual backups, and will invest time researching how to make such future catastrophes limited in effect. It happened very early on so it could've been so much worse if it happened when more people were invested. On the other hand, the site is now blank, and original content that me and Nick put there is now lost (I already apologized to Nick privately). It really depresses me how empty it is and I find it hard to find the focus to do much needed work on it. I spent a few days trying to find a way to undo the damage but there isn't any that I can find.

I would be really appreciated to see you guys re-register. I am now making regular manual backups so it should be idiot-proof from now on.

[Anz]

Footbag Front is good.

And chin up, losing the old site wasnt a big setback information-wise.

[PoisonTaffy]

Thanks! I'll try to keep my chin up

Anywho, progress is slow bug constant:

1) Added a first-time-user dialog for when someone visits the front page for the first time
2) Added ability to edit articles
3) Added ability to put articles in categories
4) articles list is sorted according to categories

I'm thinking of making a radically different front page for signed in user and non users. Signed in users see what there is now, and non users see some static text with description of what is footbag, how to get started, a single video of our choice, list of articles of category "beginners" perhaps... What do you think?

[PoisonTaffy]

The site seems static as new features are harder to notice now, but I've been working as usual.

1) Added kudos to comments
2) When you import your modified.in blog, it won't import posts that you already imported (so you can import more than once if you want)
3) Users list can be sorted by distance from you (up to 9000 miles from your location i think), if you put in your location. I think this feature has a lot of potential, right now it's just a proof of concept.
4) Added a new page, called feedback. It's just the same as videos, but the idea is that in videos you post "show off" videos, which are edited and show shred, whereas in feedback, you post videos to get feedback on your game. These videos won't appear on the front page feed & they won't appear on the rss feed, only on the feedback page. I think it's an idea worth trying out.

[Asmus]

I would like a box on the profile page for additional info, I would like to add some more shiet.

[PoisonTaffy]

New feature in the making, communities. It's basically the same as the feed at the front page, only that you can make your own feeds. Kind of like a facebook group. For example, I made a feed for session time information for Israel (or just any general chatter)
http://footbagfront.com/feeds/israel

It's pretty basic right now but functional.

[PoisonTaffy]

A lot of busywork on the site:

1) Added events, competitions and results. It's still not designed, but it's quite functional.



(As you can see, each result can be accompanied by a video. It can also be accompanied by a text description, for stuff like shred30 score, request round #, sick3 link etc.)

One thing that isn't implemented yet, users can mark their attendance to an event, I also want them to be able to mark being organizers or volunteers.

Rory Dawson helped with figuring this whole system out and gave lots of suggestions. Thanks!

2) Virtual profiles: Admins can create a profile for people who aren't registered. If the person registers, they become the profile owner and can do whatever they want with it.



This allows the admin to list results for people who haven't registered yet.

3) Admin page where they can manage virtual profiles and have their own feed for posts and stuff.

I'm starting a new Job on Sunday so I imagine these were the last big features introduced by me for a while. I think the site has a enough features already and it just needs to be designed better.

Fortunately, my gf is leaving her job in two weeks and said she's interested in doing a design overhaul for the site when that happens.